My parents used to warn me against eating sugar if I cared about my teeth, almost as if it had some magical ability to destroy matter on contact. That's exactly the power it has in Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory: a short and sweet 2D puzzle platformer in which you play as—you guessed it—a sugar cube with the passive ability to alter the physical state of almost anything he touches.

Each of the 90 levels in the game is a single screen overlaid with a grid. Your goal is to get from the starting point to the exit by flipping certain squares on the grid to on/off states that enable or disable platforms, obstructions, switches, hazards and more. You can also hold down a button to temporarily disable your powers while you move, which allows for some much-needed precision in choosing the cells you flip. Enemies, some with abilities of their own, are sometimes added to the mix to make solutions more complex.

The platforming is rough around the edges and imprecise, serving only as a crude means to execute the puzzle elements; the graphics, while cute, are low-resolution and don’t scale well to full-screen; and, while there are a few challenging puzzles, solving most of them is like taking candy from a baby. Aspartame recommends it, but the rest of me feels that it's unlikely to satisfy most people.

Grabbed this because it was - A) on sale, and B) dropped trading cards. Seemed like an easy way to use up steam funds and break even.

But wow, the gameplay actually takes some lateral thinking to get around the puzzles in the game! It's very casual compared to platformers like vvvvv, 140, or spelunky, but this game takes a simple mechanic of tiles changing as you move past them, and works with it to create an interesting, curious, yet fun and laid back puzzle platformer.

Well worth the $1.74 it's currently selling for in the November sale. Check it out!

As you absentmindedly stir them into your morning coffee and sprinkle it on your grapefruit, did you ever consider that maybe sugar has feelings too? Not just feelings, but friends and families; a whole life that inevitably leads to a tragic ending. The sugar cubes in Turtle Cream's Bittersweet Factory have had enough of this grueling cycle, and thus look to you to guide them to safety...but do you really want to?

Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory is nothing if not original, but a delightful premise and strangely charming characters can only take a game so far. Something of a puzzle platformer, levels are built around a mechanic of flipping the background to reveal or make disappear platforms, buttons, and whatever other manor of device is for some reason sitting here with these anthropomorphic sweeteners, with the express goal of making it to the exit (and by extension, freedom). It's a solid mechanic on paper that I can't recall seeing used in quite the same way, but when executed boils down to a lot of blind luck and frustration.

As you are only able to flip tiles in a small area around you, you're often forced to awkwardly jump around to reveal tiles (most of which you have no way of finding without raw trial and error), which leads to an endless stream of inaccuracies. Because the grid around you that decrees what tiles you can flip is never quite constant, it's enough of a challenge to get tiles to flip consistently, which is to say nothing of the precision required in later levels. Difficulty through mechanical issues is never the right way to challenge the player, and this mistake is built into the foundation of everything Sugar Cube attempts.

Despite being most easily described as a puzzle platformer, there's a noticeable absence of anything intended to make you think or otherwise befuddle. Levels are decidedly straight forward from beginning to end, with rarely a spot of innovation or an interesting use of the game's sole mechanic. Haphazard and nondescript, each level bleeds into the next with a dull and tedious complacency, missing every halfhearted opportunity to do something inspired until you finally stumble upon the ending less than two hours later.

That ending is Sugar Cube's one redeeming quality, and not just because it means I can finally set it down and move onto better games. As the credits role, an upbeat track cutely puts into words just how sad a world it would be without chocolate. It's charming and catchy, and for a moment made me completely forgive the numerous mistakes that Sugar Cube otherwise makes. I couldn't help but love it and will surely have it stuck in my head and on my playlist for some time to come.

Unfortunately, the journey to get to that point is nowhere near as sweet and for a game about sugar left a rather sour taste in my mouth.

A lot of indie developers torpedo their platformer by making it too hard, but making a game too easy can ruin it as well. There's nothing wrong with easy games on their own, they just need something more to keep players hooked since the challenge isn't going to be carrying the weight. Sugar Cube definitely tries with its mix of clever puzzle mechanics, but never really puts forth anything to keep you playing. And considering you can clear the whole thing out in an hour, it's really hard to suggest it for more than just an afternoon diversion.

You play a suspendered little sugar cube man intent on escaping the candy factory before being processed into something edible. This means platforming through 90 screens of blocks, traps, and switches to reach freedom. There's a very standard assortment of spikes, springs, conveyors, and monsters to make your way around, split across five areas which keep mechanics compartmentalized. At the end of each area is a boss that you don't fight, you just skirt past to get to the exit. It's exactly what you do in every level, get to the exit, only with a bigger monster.

All of this is old hat for the puzzle platform genre, so to sweeten the deal the developers added a flipping mechanic. Every level is set against a grid of tiles which your cube guy flips as he passes. Flipping tiles can reveal new platforms, new switches, new spikes, or disappear any of them. This puts an extra layer of strategy over every move you make, because you might only get one shot at a platform before you flip it away. Levels take advantage of this with platforms to ascend with sequential flipping or mazes of solid blocks to flip paths through. Later into the game you'll also find items that let you flip the entire level at once.

It's a clever twist, but not one used to the fullest. A lot of levels simply come down to jumping on platforms in the right order or finding the one section of wall you can flip open to pass. Each screen is small enough that the solution is pretty obvious simply for lack of options in the space provided. There's also a button you can hold to NOT flip tiles you pass, which shuts down a huge number of threats you could present via flipping. Honestly a lot of levels can be waltzed through in seconds if you just remember that button exists. There are no puzzles here that I would consider brain-bending at all, and even the special collectibles (few that there are) are trivial to pick up on your way to the solution.

I'm a sucker for cute games and Sugar Cube is definitely adorable, but the art style is basic in a way I don't really appreciate. It's all plain shapes with no details or shading which makes it look like a cheap Flash game, and the noticeable lack of animation frames on everything doesn't help in the least. There are some pretty glaring technical issues as well, like cutscenes not playing in fullscreen and the game straight-up crashing if you alt-tab away. If you bother to stick with this one it'll only last you an hour or so anyway, so between the lack of challenge and the rough edges, I don't see much reason to sample this little morsel.

Short puzzle platform game. The puzzles are simpler than, let's say, Toki Tori, yet you'll struggle with some stages.You can beat it in 3~4 hours, but if you're going for all 20 achievements it will take you a lot more. The "no dying in a whole world" achievements are a pain in the♥♥♥♥♥It's innovative, definitely a blow of fresh air to the platform video game genre. Cute and colorful, this game is for everyone.The music is decent, but the credits theme/music video (which you can watch on the store page) is very nice!

Some people are experiencing problems with cutscenes not playing on full-screen mode. To fix it, go to options, switch to windowed mode, and switch back to full-screen mode.

An extraordinarily goofy puzzle platformer. I honestly liked many of the puzzles, but it was a relatively limited game in terms of controls, none of the puzzles were all that difficult (except for when you had to time running under bosses) and several of them seemed like I cheated past 2/3 of the puzzle, and the graphics were more weird than good.

On the other hand, the story and cutscenes are sure something. I'm almost tempted to give it a thumbs up for trying to tell a serious story about the suffering of your average, everyday sugar cube, but in the end it comes down to it being a little on the mediocre side and only 90 minutes long for the $7 price point.

Do watch the cutscenes on YouTube or something, though, if the thing I said about the story amuses you.

You don't understand screaming profanity at the ceiling until you've played this game. With a ton of levels, and a never ending amount of rage; you are more likely to win at CS:GO at 2fps. Overall, the game is amazing, bought it on sale because why not? and its a great addition to my library. 8/10